Hidden Symptoms

by Deirdre Madden

  If there really were such a thing as magic, he thought, it had something to do with women’s bodies.

  He watched while Kathy stretched open her deep-set eyes by carefully drawing a mascara brush across each set of eyelashes in turn, an action which he found slightly alarming for the way in which it momentarily lifted the eyelid away from the eyeball. She then smeared a purply-coloured powder on the lids and her eyes remained miraculously wide, their naturally piggy look lost. He watched while she changed the shape of her face by carefully dabbing her cheekbones with an ochre fluid; and while she painted her lips deep red. She kissed a tissue and painted them again, then turned a countenance like a water-colour towards the pier glass to survey the final effect. She saw that he was looking at her looking at herself in his mirror, and without turning round she bounced a smile off the pier glass and across the room to him. The smile revealed a tiny speck of lipstick on her teeth: she carefully wiped it away. She then gathered together all the little bottles and tubes and replaced them in their small corduroy make-up bag, checking in turn that the lid of each was tight.

  Robert would have gained a distinctly voyeuristic thrill from watching anyone transform themselves from the sleepy-eyed and tousled person who crept out of bed in the morning into the dressed and groomed creature who normally faced the world: that it was Kathy simply made it more aesthetically pleasing. As a child, it had been a revelation for him to discover that Miss McGuire, the harridan who taught him when he was in Infants, was not born wearing her brown tweed pinafore. She had to undress herself and go to bed every night and she had to dress herself in the morning in layers, just as Robert himself and his family had to do. It took some believing that other people’s clothes were like his own and not all of a piece, like the paper clothes which Rosie’s cardboard dolls wore, hanging over their printed underwear from the little tabs at their shoulders. It was hard to believe that other people had real lives utterly independent of his own and, more amazing still, that in the humblest and most mundane features these other lives were just like his own. (Oh, the sight of Miss McGuire that Saturday morning, buying a quarter of cinnamon lozenges! And his father’s mirth afterwards as he told his mother, “If ye’d seen the eyes of him, near out on two stalks, he thinks she comes up out of the floor to teach him and then goes back down again!”) Of all his childhood fancies, this had been the most powerful and the most comprehensive. It was the only one about which he was loath to speak, because it still existed in a residual, but strongly perceptible, form. He liked it when his girlfriends stayed the night with him instead of going back to the empty facades of their family homes to wait for their next cue into his life. By staying and sleeping with him and letting him see them putting on their make-up and their clothes in the morning, they seemed to extend their existence: to re-create themselves. He like that: it helped confirm reality for him.

  Kathy was now brushing out her hair. She fastened it up with two combs of tortoiseshell plastic, then moved across the room to a chair by the window and sat in profile to him, looking out into the street.

  What was in her mind? Most likely her own sins, he thought. He had never yet met a woman with the guts for atheism; they were all cringing with at least vestigial Christianity at heart. A few nights before that they had inadvertently begun to talk about religion, and when he asked her outright if she believed in God she had said, “No,” but with a “No” so reluctant and so diffident that he did not believe it. He had teased and nagged her, “You do, you do, go on, admit it,” until at last she lost her temper. “Alright, so what if I do? You can be a right pig, Robert McConville, a right bully.”

  So what? It put the power of real sin in her hand. Amorality was a bland business, but Kathy was immoral, and spectacularly so. She believed in free choice for right and wrong, and she wilfully, gleefully, chose wrong. It was exciting to dabble with perdition. With a mixture of alarm and sadness, he had listened to the discourse which she poured in his ear one night in bed a short time after he had first known her, a long seamless speech concerning her mother. “So-then-she-said-and-then-I-said …” She told him about the scene there had been when her mother found out that she had been sleeping with her boyfriend, information which she had volunteered not because she had to, but because she wanted to annoy. “I hope she’s happy now she knows that I’m as bad as she always said I was.” It was mainly because of this that he did not believe that she loved him, in spite of her frequent claims to the contrary. He didn’t care about being loved but he despised her for lying about it. She had practically admitted to her mother that she did what she did only for the sake of sex and sin, not love. Why, then, would she not admit it to him? As well him as another. Damn, he would make her admit to it, just as he had made her admit to her sneaking religion.

  “Kathy,” he said, softly, perfidiously, “penny for your thoughts.” Would she say something cosmetic and coy — “I was thinking about us”? She shook her head and said nothing.

  “Kathy? Come on, tell me.” She was silent for another moment before speaking.

  “I was thinking about Theresa,” she said.

  “Oh, her,” he snorted, disappointed at the inaccuracy of his guess. Now there was one person whom he would not want to see prove their reality in the morning. He would have preferred conclusive evidence that she was merely a figment of his imagination, a bad-tempered, chain-smoking hallucination.

  “Yes, Theresa,” said Kathy crossly, “and you needn’t take that tone when you’re talking about her.”

  “Oh, but Kathy, she’s so belligerent, so aggressive. You saw the way she got at me the other day, making a personal attack out of a political discussion.”

  “You deserved that, Robert, and don’t try to tell me you didn’t. She said no more than the truth. If you thought about it at all you’d see that she’s right.”

  “I do think,” he said indignantly.

  “No, you don’t. Oh, come on, Robert, admit it: you pride yourself on being apolitical, away above all that. It doesn’t even interest you.”

  “Well, there’s no need for her to be so bloody ardent.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being ardent, Robert. It’s better than being apathetic.”

  He did not like the direction this exchange was taking; now he would either have to lose face or let it develop into a full-scale row. “She smokes too much,” he eventually said lamely. “That really gets on my wick, so it does, Is she on commission from Rothman’s, or what?”

  “It’s nerves,” said Kathy.

  “Nerves? What has she got to be nervous about?”

  “She hardly smoked at all when I first knew her,” said Kathy, which was not an answer to the question which he had asked; and saying that she had been thinking of Theresa had not been strict truth, either, for although she had been thinking of her while putting on her make-up, by the time she moved to the window she was thinking of Francis.

  Theresa and Francis were twins. They started at Queen’s the same year as Kathy and all three were in the same class. They soon developed the custom of meeting each day in the Union for coffee and Mars Bars, while Francis, the most inveterate and most inept doer of crosswords she had ever met, attempted the Simplex puzzle in the Irish Times.

  “Twelve down. Bubbles on the skin. Eight letters. No idea.”

  “Blisters. Easy-peas,” she crowed. “Gimme another.” After his death, Theresa had given her as a keepsake a Daily Telegraph book of crosswords in which every single puzzle had been attempted, but not one of which was complete.

  From the first she had preferred Francis to Theresa, because she was reserved while he was genuinely shy: he made a much greater effort to be friendly than his sister ever did. They were always together. Sometimes Kathy wondered if Theresa resented slightly her friendship with Francis. She was hurt and surprised when he left college after the Easter vacation in first year, for he had not given even a hint that he was thinking of such a move. When she asked Theresa about it, Theresa said crossly,
“Oh, Francis! Don’t even start me on that. He said he was leaving Queen’s because he couldn’t get to grips with it, as lightly as you like, as if it was an evening class in O-level crochet or something. We can’t get wit out of him, you might as well talk to the fireplace.”

  “What will he do now?”

  “I shudder to think.”

  He took a job filling shelves in a city-centre supermarket. Kathy saw him often between his leaving university in the spring and his death that autumn. She used to call into the supermarket and saw him in his brown overall, stacking up jars of instant coffee or putting price labels on tins of condensed soup. She asked him why he did not try to find a more interesting job.

  “I like boring work,” he said. “It leaves my mind free for higher things. Anyway,” he added, “I don’t expect to be here for very long,” a remark which, with hindsight, she understood even less than she had done at the time. Her friendships with Theresa and Francis became consolidated for their being conducted separately. She was immensely fond of Francis, who had the most tender and lovely smile she had ever seen. When Francis smiled at her she felt important and loved, although in sustained conversation he failed utterly to maintain eye contact; his glance flitting from his shoes to displays of cornflakes to huge yellow posters saying “Low Low Prices.” Before they parted, he always dared to look her in the face once more.

  He took her out to lunch a few times, to a seedy little café where the sandwiches indecorously turned up their crusts to reveal their fillings; and a solitary, stale pork pie lurked under a perspex dome like the control of a scientific experiment which had gone horribly wrong. “Have a fly’s graveyard,” he would say, “or a wee cement biscuit, they’re nice.” Kathy was often lonely, and then she would envy Theresa her gentle, eccentric brother. She had never known two people so close. She wished that she was half of such a loving couple. Maybe if she had had a brother or sister, it might have been like that. It wasn’t fair that she was an only child with a mother who didn’t care for her and a dead father whom she couldn’t even remember, and a fluctuating fund of men, none of whom had ever really cared for her any more than she cared for them. But then Francis died, and she felt guilty for envying Theresa. She knew that the greater the love, the harder it must be now.

  She would never forget the first time she saw Theresa back in college after the murder, sitting at a table in the Union, and looking abnormally solitary. She looked incomplete and shockingly different; even her hair and clothes seemed bereaved. Kathy had been unable to approach her then and had gone away and cried and cried. Looking at Theresa alone, she had felt intense pity and fear.

  “Think kindly of her, Robert, please. You don’t understand her.”

  “And you do?”

  “Not completely, but still better than you do.” She came over and sat beside him on the bed. “It’s wrong for you to judge her, you mustn’t do it.” She leaned against him and put her arms around his neck, thinking how very lucky she was to have Robert. At least somebody loved her.

  Robert gently removed the plastic combs and ruffled her hair. Bloody women. He would never understand them. He thought Theresa a most unlikely friend for Kathy and wondered what the attraction could be. Probably that of an unplumbed opposite, he guessed. Theresa’s strange eyes had their effect seemingly without any willed effort on her part; her gaze was like that of an indolent cobra. She was a right oddity, he thought. In a way she wasn’t really like a girl. Never before had he met anyone so angular and androgynous; indeed, never before had he known anyone for so long and so little considered their sex. It had only really come to his attention some two days before their recent argument, when he had been again obliged to give her a lift home from the library. On reaching her street, the door-lock on her side was stuck, so he had leant across to open it, and as he did so, through the thick fog of cigarette smoke which permanently hung around her, he had smelt the faintest whiff of a light, flowery perfume. He felt not the tiniest frisson of sexuality, but a major tremor of shock: for the first time ever, he was conscious of her body. It begged more questions than it answered. He wondered if she was a virgin, but balked at the notion, for he shuddered to imagine what it would be like to kiss her, much less sleep with her. Kissing Theresa, he thought, would be dangerous and painful; it would sting the lips as it did to kiss a poisoned Bible or a religious statue daubed with Belladonna in a Jacobean tragedy. To embrace her would be like driving an iron spike into his chest.

  One day when he was small, a wasp had stung him at school. Miss McGuire applied her sovereign remedy for stings, which was malt vinegar painted on with a long-handled sable brush, but he had continued to weep pathetically (the smell of the vinegar was almost as bad as the sting). Miss McGuire then kissed him on the cheek, and he immediately forgot both smell and sting in the shock of discovering that her face was as warm and soft as his own. He still felt that it would be eerie and unnerving to discover by experience that Theresa’s body was as warm, soft, mortal and sexual as that of anyone else.

  “She never talks about her family,” he said.

  “No,” replied Kathy, “and neither do you.” She leant over and kissed him on the lips, which made it physically impossible for him to either answer this retort or to ask any further awkward questions. For the first time that morning, he guessed correctly what was in her mind, but although he knew she wanted to keep him quiet, he could not know the reason why. The ruse worked, however: it provided sufficient distraction to turn his thoughts away from Theresa. He considered her now, together with the other women whom he knew. Theresa, Kathy, Rosie, his mother — what did any of them truly think and feel? And why? None of them were deliberately mysterious and yet they were all a mystery. He wished for understanding for the sake of pure curiosity rather than for the love which he might have had for any of them. There was always an obstruction. He had never felt real unity with any woman; worse, he had never once even reached a consensus by which they agreed to differ. He had drifted away from all the girls he had ever known with no more ultimate intimacy than there had been when they first met. He looked down at the crown of Kathy’s head. Did he really want to understand her? No. Did he love her? No, and if he had been mistaken about what was in her mind when she was sitting at the window he was convinced that it was an error of time only. She did delight in what she was doing; he was her sin, he furnished the glamour of her being “bad.” So be it. He put his hand under her chin to raise her head and saw, to his puzzlement and utter exasperation, that her eyes were filled with tears.

  * * *

  A black-and-white photograph of her parents’ wedding hung over the china cabinet in the parlour, and Theresa’s attention was drawn to it again and again. She wondered how her parents — how anyone — went through with a white wedding, for she could never countenance even the possibility of it for herself. She thought that weddings were unspeakably vulgar and almost primitive in their hidebound custom and attention to detail: the white dress, the communal meal of cooked meats and a tall cake, the speeches, dancing and confetti, the crude remarks lipsticked across the windscreen of a car festooned with toilet paper and old boots. The unhappy happy couple were at least spared the Eastern ignominy of having their entire extended family beating at their bedroom door, demanding proof of lost virginity. As The Preacher said, there is nothing in this world that is new, and white weddings, Theresa thought, like the popular press and much television, are greatly dependent upon unoriginality and repetition for their ultimate success.

  It was partly because of this that she found it hard to believe that her mother remembered her wedding day as a real day and not merely in terms of black-and-white photographs, a few dried flowers, some cards and telegrams and a yellowed tulle veil. These objects, like holy relics or objects in a museum, alienated Theresa from that to which they pertained, rather than bringing them closer, their frail, folded, dated state stressing for her how very old they were and how far in the past the event had been. It took an effort to re
member that her parents’ wedding day had been a real day, a day with weather and milk deliveries. She could never fully catch and hold that idea, so that the day remained a series of images. She could make no satisfactory substitute for experience. Her isolation from her parents’ marriage made her sad, because it was part of her isolation from her father and it made her very sad to think of his having died before she was old enough to remember him.

  Somewhere in the house there was a large manila envelope containing an eclectic array of photographs of her father. There were some fuzzy little snaps stapled into covers of ginger cardboard to form tiny books; and a studio portrait of him when he was twenty, in which he was grinning at the camera with well-fed confidence. There was an oval sepia print of a scruffy little boy with a skew-whiff Eton collar; and a tattered class photograph taken when he was nine, and upon which he had later indicated his own tiny image with a heavily inked “X,” completely obliterating the face of the child directly behind him. Theresa’s favorite photograph of him was one taken by a street photographer years before her father’s marriage. He looked so young and happy, as unaware of death as he was of the eye of the camera. What had happened before and after that instant when, as he passed innocently down the street, a clicking shutter had made of him an eternal image for his unborn daughter? Around him, the city spawned and died. There was a cigarette between his fingers; moments later he would have extinguished it; an hour later smoked another and that evening bought a new packet, moving away from the moment of the photograph and towards his own death. History of some sort had been made that day, for there was never a day so dull that the newspapers had no headlines, but what was for her its only significant event was unrecorded. No paper carried the leader: “Patsy Cassidy Snapped by Street Photographer.” She would have given a year of her life to know the day and the hour at which that photograph had been taken. She felt that such knowledge would have given her the power to pluck and save her father from the flux of time.